How big is your integral theory of everything, and what does your everything leave out? Sean Esbjörn-Hargens has spent two decades on that question. His framework, Complex Integral Realism, puts Ken Wilber’s integral theory, Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, and Edgar Morin’s complex thought into sustained dialogue, each standing on its own terms rather than folded into one master model.

In this IAM Research Forum session, he walks through how the framework came together and what each tradition brings, from Wilber’s map of consciousness and development, to Bhaskar’s depth ontology and critical philosophy, to Morin’s complexity science and self-reflexive epistemology. He argues for an integrative pluralism over an integrative monism, with no single ring to rule them all, and for a post-formal metatheory that can hold paradox and ambiguity without flattening them. Running underneath is his central claim, that even our biggest maps need to do shadow work. What are they leaving out? What are they quietly repressing?

Timestamps

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:05:00 – Origins: “You’re Not Integral If You Don’t Know Bhaskar”
00:11:27 – Shadow Work for Metatheories
00:17:38 – Defining Complex Integral Realism
00:21:06 – What Wilber, Bhaskar, and Morin Each Bring
00:35:20 – What Does Your Everything Leave Out?
00:37:47 – Mark Edwards: Are We Building Towers of Babel?
00:45:33 – Sean Kelly on Edgar Morin’s Legacy
00:55:02 – Can Enactment Survive Realism?
01:11:53 – What Enactment Actually Means
01:15:27 – Which Tree Is the Real Tree?
01:18:20 – Closing Reflections

Nick Hedlund describes Visionary Realism as an attempt to sketch a worldview adequate to the complexity and sacredness of reality, one built on reverence, humility, and listening. In this episode of the Integration podcast, he talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about what stands in the way: the split Kant first named between what’s knowable and what’s real, a divide Hedlund traces forward into postmodernism and treats as the hidden engine of the metacrisis.

Visionary Realism grew out of Ken Wilber’s integral theory and Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, though Hedlund is clear that neither survives the encounter unchanged. His answer to the Kantian split runs through Bhaskar’s distinction between the world as it is and the world as we know it, arriving at a reframing he calls “constellational containment,” where mind sits nested within the world rather than sealed off from it. Along the way he makes a case for reading Piaget as a realist, and turns to what “visionary” is doing in the name, drawing on the Promethean myth and Bhaskar’s reminder that the world doesn’t depend on us the way we depend on it.

Hedlund is also candid about what’s still missing, including a fuller theory of value and Bhaskar’s later, more spiritual work, an area he’s only begun opening up. The episode closes on philosophy as a way of life, and on Hedlund’s own question of what his essence actually is. Visionary Realism, he says, is “a philosophy I can live by.”

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Timestamps

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:22 – What Visionary Realism Is
00:07:33 – Promethean Fire and the Limits of What We Make
00:11:41 – The Split Kant Left Behind
00:18:32 – Where Does a Dog Exist?
00:30:44 – Mind Nested Within World
00:46:09 – Participatory, Process, Pluralistic
00:52:19 – What’s Still Missing
01:00:19 – Spirituality Without Losing the Secular Mind
01:09:04 – A Philosophy to Live By

Nick Hedlund calls the metacrisis a forcing function for humanity’s self-understanding, asking us to rethink what reality is, what a human being is, what nature and the sacred are. Visionary Realism is his answer: a philosophical framework built as a root level response to the metacrisis in service of radical planetary flourishing, forged by putting two serious traditions, Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism and Ken Wilber’s integral theory, into sustained dialogue, letting each transfigure the other into something genuinely new.

In this IAM Research Forum session, Hedlund walks through what each tradition gets right on its own (critical realism’s depth ontology, integral theory’s map of human development) and where each runs out of road, building toward the four core ideas of Visionary Realism: pandimensional realism, a new science of interiority, transcendental evolutionary realism, and alethic resonance, the idea that our worldviews and institutions need to stay in tune with reality itself.

Timestamps

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:40 – Origins: The Ecological Crisis and the Birth of the Metacrisis
00:13:40 – A Metatheory of Metatheories: Alpha, Beta, Gamma
00:19:50 – What Critical Realism Brings
00:30:10 – What Integral Theory Brings, and Where It Falls Short
00:38:20 – Forging the Synthesis: Visionary Realism
01:00:20 – Alethic Resonance: Staying in Tune with Reality
01:05:03 – Q&A: Open Questions
01:30:19 – Closing Reflections

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Leigh Price sits down with Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey to go further into critical realism than her IAM Research Forum talk had room for. She traces Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy through its major phases, from transcendental realism through dialectical critical realism, where his concept of absence resolves long-standing puzzles in the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic.

From there, she unpacks what’s often called Bhaskar’s “spiritual turn,” the philosophy of metaReality: its account of non-duality and re-enchantment, and its debt to the African concept of Ubuntu. She also shares her own contribution to the field, an argument that critical realism functions as a form of systems theory, one it’s rarely been credited for.

Price describes the historic dialogues between critical realists and integral theorists, where real synthesis emerged alongside real tension, and recalls working alongside Bhaskar directly, including an unfinished chapter on human flourishing he asked her to write shortly before he died.

The episode closes on critical realism’s relevance to the metacrisis, including the case that most of us already reason like critical realists in practice, and what it would take to actually shift the root metaphors we use to make sense of the world.

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Timestamps

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:15 – The Phases of Critical Realism: From Transcendental Realism to Dialectics
00:03:52 – Discovering Absence: Bhaskar’s Breakthrough Beyond Hegel and Marx
00:15:34 – Bhaskar, Marx, and Freud: Emancipation and the Roots of Dialectic
00:22:12 – The Philosophy of metaReality
00:32:05 – Critical Realism as Unrecognized Systems Theory
00:38:24 – Critical Realism Meets Integral Theory
00:52:48 – What’s Missing: The Unwritten Chapter on Flourishing
01:02:33 – Critical Realism and the Metacrisis
01:07:29 – Closing Reflections and Gratitude

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Bruce Alderman returns for a deeper look at integral theory, continuing the conversation he opened at the IAM Research Forum. Joined by Brendan Graham Dempsey and Nick Hedlund, he traces Wilber’s path into integral theory from its roots in transpersonal psychology through the five moving parts of the AQAL model: quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types.

Alderman then turns to where the model runs thin. He walks through its weak connection to evolutionary biology and philosopher Mark Edwards’ critique that integral quietly conflates the individual and the collective, tracing how a framework built to hold everything together can end up flattening real differences.

Yet Alderman argues these limits open onto something generative. He introduces his own toolkit for reading any big framework: a lightly-held approach to categories he calls the “a-categorical imperative,” and “heno-ontology,” a way of letting frameworks like integral theory and critical realism each hold their own ground without one swallowing the rest.

The episode closes on a question left open for the whole Integrative Metatheory 2.0 project: one new synthesized map, or several frameworks working side by side?

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Timestamps

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:41 – A Primer on Wilberian Integral Theory: From Transpersonal Roots to AQAL
00:16:05 – Where the Model Runs Thin: Science, Evolution, and Mark Edwards’ Critique
00:22:05 – Mapping What Came After Wilber
00:29:24 – Inside Bruce’s Grammar for Reading Big Ideas
00:44:00 – Heno-ontology: Holding Multiple Frameworks at Once
00:48:00 – Pushback: Does This Flatten Ontology and Epistemology?
00:54:47 – One Map or Many? The Open Question for Integrative Metatheory 2.0
01:17:56 – Closing Thoughts and What’s Next

What is actually real, and how do we know it? Roy Bhaskar built a philosophy of science arguing that reality runs deeper than what we can observe, with real structures and causes behind the events we see, and made that philosophy the engine of an emancipatory politics. Ken Wilber built a map of the different ways people grow, know, and experience the world. This IAM Research Forum session brings scholars of both traditions, critical realism and integral theory, into direct dialogue.

Leigh Price, who worked directly with Bhaskar and now directs the Roy Bhaskar Centre, walks through his ideas in five stages, from his account of what’s real versus what’s merely observed, through his model of how individuals and society shape each other, to the emancipatory and even spiritual turns his thinking eventually took.

Bruce Alderman, an Associate Director of the Blue Sky Leaders Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, traces what happened to Wilber’s four-quadrant map, and the many scholars who revised, corrected, and extended it. He then shares his own contribution: a way of reading any big framework by the grammar it’s built on, and a concept called “heno-ontology” for how frameworks like these can hold each other up without any one swallowing the rest.

The two ideas meet directly when Price and Alderman work through a shared example (a set of cutlery) that shows their frameworks converging on the same insight from different directions. From there the conversation turns to a bigger question: what would it look like for frameworks like these to actually work together, and how do you make ideas this rich usable for people who aren’t scholars.

Timestamps

00:00:00 – Meet the Speakers

00:03:26 – Roy Bhaskar’s Life and the Origins of Critical Realism

00:16:13 – What’s Real vs. What We Observe

00:30:12 – How Individuals and Society Shape Each Other

00:34:03 – The Emancipatory and Spiritual Turns

00:36:56 – Ken Wilber’s Map, and Where People Took It Next

01:00:45 – A Framework for Reading Any Big Idea

01:11:22 – The Two Ideas Meet: A Shared Example

01:16:22 – Can These Frameworks Work Together?

01:19:00 – Making Big Ideas Usable for Everyone

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Dr. Gregg Henriques joins Brendan Graham Dempsey and Nick Hedlund for a deeper dive into the Unified Theory of Knowledge. His earlier presentation at the IAM Research Forum established the philosophical context; this conversation goes inside the model itself.

Key themes include the Tree of Knowledge in depth: the four cones of complexification and how matter, life, mind, and culture emerge as distinct information-processing domains. The conversation also takes up two levels of consciousness and what UTOK has to say about panpsychism, before turning to the RAFTing model (Relating, Acting, Feeling, Thinking) as a practical framework for psychology. Dr. Henriques closes by reflecting on UTOK’s limits and what it stands to gain from engagement with other metatheories.

Modernity’s greatest achievements came without a coherent worldview to guide them. Without an adequate foundation for what is real and what we value, coordinating at the scale we now inhabit remains an open problem. That, Dr. Henriques argues, is precisely what UTOK is working to address.

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Timestamps

00:00:00 – Introduction: Continuing the UTOK Conversation
00:02:52 – Unpacking the Tree of Knowledge Diagram
00:15:15 – The Emergence of Mind: From Organism to Culture
00:32:12 – UTOK and Consciousness
00:46:05 – The Hard Problem and Perspectival Epistemic Portal
00:55:10 – The RAFTing Model as Applied Psychology
01:09:07 – The Real-World Stakes of Metatheory
01:09:33 – UTOK’s Limits and What It Still Needs

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Robb Smith joins Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey to make the case for Integrative Metatheory 2.0. Drawing on a project that began with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens’ meta-integral work in 2010-2013, they explore how frameworks like critical realism, Edgar Morin’s complex thought, and metamodernism entered the conversation alongside integral theory, and what it now takes to bring them into genuine dialogue.

Key themes include a typology of metatheories (philosophical, scientific, and synthetic), the causal force of worldviews in shaping our understanding of and response to planetary-scale systems, and why AI and other accelerating developments make adequate conceptual foundations more urgent than ever. The group also takes up negative transfiguration as a core commitment: the aim is for frameworks to genuinely learn from and alter each other, rather than collapse into a single grand synthesis.

The conversation closes on what success looks like for the project: frameworks that change as a result of dialogue, and the emergence of a shared grammar adequate to navigating between disciplines and philosophical traditions.

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Timestamps

00:00:15 – Introduction and Project Overview
00:02:48 – The Project’s History: From Meta-Integral to IMT 2.0
00:05:40 – The “So What?” Critique
00:13:47 – Modernity Scaled the Planet on a Fragmented Worldview
00:20:41 – Worldview, AI, and the Question of Agency
00:46:08 – A Typology of Metatheories
00:54:22 – What Does Success Look Like?
00:57:07 – Negative Transfiguration

Modern science has produced an increasingly sophisticated picture of the physical world. Where it has persistently struggled is in placing mind and consciousness within that picture. Gregg Henriques calls this the Enlightenment Gap, and he argues it sits at the root of the metacrisis.

In this IAM Research Forum session, Dr. Henriques presents the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) as a natural philosophy built to close that gap. His diagnosis begins with what he calls gist ontology: we share a basic working picture of what matter is and what life is, yet we lack any comparable picture of mind. UTOK’s response pairs a transjective epistemology with a coherent naturalistic ontology. Scientific knowing operates alongside subjective experience and cultural meaning-making, each irreducible to the others, while the Tree of Knowledge system reorganizes the sciences around the successive emergence of matter, life, mind, and culture.

Psychology turns out to be the linchpin: the sciences cohere up to neuroscience, then fracture exactly where psychology should stand, and that fracture is what has kept the Enlightenment Gap open. Dr. Henriques closes with UTOK’s metapsychology and his new RAFTing model, which treats mind as a process ontology: the animal body is the raft, and mindedness is the activity of rafting it through the world. The discussion then takes up realism about the intersubjective domain, the questions UTOK leaves open, and what it contributes alongside integral theory and critical realism to building an ecology of integrated metatheories.

Timestamps

00:00:02 – Introduction: Dr. Gregg Henriques and UTOK
00:04:03 – The Enlightenment Gap
00:08:51 – The Central Question for Integrative Metatheory
00:20:55 – UTOK’s Philosophy: Descriptive Metaphysics and Epistemology
00:27:57 – The Tree of Knowledge System
00:39:18 – The Problem of Psychology
00:52:32 – Metapsychology and the RAFTing Model
01:01:02 – Discussion: UTOK and the Ecology of Metatheories

The metacrisis runs deeper than most accounts suggest. Beneath the visible crises of governance and climate lies a more fundamental problem: the fragmentation of knowledge itself. Integrative metatheory has been the most sustained attempt to address this, bringing the broad sweep of human understanding toward a coherent worldview.

This session marks the official launch of that effort’s next chapter. Robb Smith, Nick Hedlund, and Brendan Graham Dempsey introduce Integrative Metatheory 2.0, an initiative to bring the most rigorous big-picture frameworks, including critical realism, integral theory, process philosophy, and metamodernism, into sustained dialogue with each other. The goal is practical: to develop a worldview coherent enough to help policymakers and leaders navigate planetary-scale problems, with outputs including books and textbooks grounded in this synthesis. The discussion takes on the hard questions this project has to face: how to hold scientific rigor alongside genuine spiritual depth, and why the conditions for doing this work may be uniquely available right now. 

Timestamps

00:00:34 – The Metacrisis as an Integration Crisis
00:10:26 – The Principles of Integrative Metatheory 2.0
00:16:47 – The Road Ahead: Forums, Podcasts, and the Symposium
00:37:29 – Q&A: Where Does Spirituality Fit?
00:42:43 – Gist Ontology and the Missing Layer in Psychology
01:02:59 – The Real-World Impact of Metatheory
01:09:41 – Why This Convergence Is Possible Now